After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the world.
[…] One can love God, but it is only
By giving you a name: this name, stone, your name,
And taking you thus, with open eyes
Into our room of names, our refuge.
We cannot think
Toward the outside. We cannot
Conceive of that without name,
Without room for meaning,
This we cannot do, it would be for our feet
To trip over a cadaver in a tomb.
For it is death, in fact,
That alone does not signify,
It is death alone that, under each word, hides itself,
And if the sound at the bottom of a word catches us, sometimes,
When we stumble over one syllable,
If it is then something within us that suddenly
Does not speak, does not signify, is only a chasm,
We recoil from the rim of the chasm
Tottering, legs heavy with vertigo,
And we let ourselves fall
Into the dense grass of the world that we are.
And if God is only a thing,
Why would we desire him? He, the outside,
He who would ravage all our memories […]
The possibility of confessio […] opens when the utopia (I no longer
have place for myself, I no longer give a place to myself, and I do not know
from where the place of my desire comes over me) is no longer fixed in
itself, no longer closed on itself, no longer withdrawn as aporia, but itself
becomes the response: when the not-here appears as an other place, or
rather an otherplace, an alteration that displaces the place outside itself,
outside even the self, in such a way as to open the over-there as my place.
“Sed ubi manes in memoria mea, Domine, ubi illic manes?” (But where
do you reside in this memory that is called mine, O Lord, where do you
reside over there?) – Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place
Lucie Brock-Broido from The Master Letters
love finding old notes in my phone. these two are roughly two years apart, trying to say the same thing.
Sufjan Stevens: “To Be Alone With You”
Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia
”It is not the way a man talks about God, but the way he talks about things of the world that best shows whether his soul has passed through the fire of the love of God. In this matter no deception is possible. There are false imitations of the love of God, but not of the transformation it effects in the soul, because one has no idea of this transformation except by passing through it oneself.
When a man’s way of behaving towards things and men, or simply his way of regarding them, reveals supernatural virtues, one knows that his soul is no longer virgin, it has slept with God; perhaps even without knowing it, like a girl violated in her sleep. That [not knowing it] has no importance, it is only the fact that matters. What is proof is the appearance of supernatural virtues in that part of its behavior which is turned towards men”.
Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me
against my flicker of impulse lust: teach me
to see them as sisters & daughters. Sustain
my grand endeavors: husbandship & crafting.
Forsake me not when my wild hours come;
grant me sleep nightly, grace soften my dreams
achieve in me patience till the thing be done,
a careful view of my achievement come.
Make me from time to time the gift of the shoulder.
When all hurt nerves whine shut away the whiskey.
Empty my heart toward Thee.
Let me pace without fear the common path of death.
Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter:
fill her eyes with tears. Forgive me, Lord.
Unite my various soul,
sole watchman of the wide & single stars.
Little Bristling Soul 